DOCSLIB.ORG

Shamers on the Prowl in Social Media Jungle 1 August 2015

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Shamers on the Prowl in Social Media Jungle 1 August 2015 Shamers on the prowl in social media jungle 1 August 2015 The killing of a Zimbabwean lion by an American 'Troublemaker' dentist is a vivid reminder of how, in this era of social media, it's a virtual jungle out there. Many of her 174 Twitter followers were friends, and she clearly identified herself in her online profile as Big game hunter Walter Palmer joins a growing list a "troublemaker on the side" with a "loud laugh." of individuals—famous and not so famous—who have been publicly, even ruthlessly shamed on But Sacco instantly became a global laughing Twitter and Facebook, the village stocks of the stock, awash in a tsunami of blistering tweets that 21st century. only intensified when she got off her 11-hour flight, discovered what was happening and apologized. "He needs to be extradited, charged and preferably hanged" for slaying game park lion Cecil, said Even businesses and charities jumped on the animal rights group PETA in one particularly bandwagon. By one estimate Google made up to scathing tweet. $468,000 off the Internet traffic it generated, according to British writer Jon Ronson. "I hope you burn in hell," echoed several other Twitter users as #CecilTheLion became this past "You can lead a good ethical life, but some bad week's hashtag du jour. phraseology in a tweet can overwhelm it all," said Ronson, author of "So You've Been Publicly Stoning, torture, even being fed to the lions were Shamed," in a TED talk in London in June. further suggestions posted online as Palmer went to ground and Zimbabwe called for his extradition. In a sense, the Internet has stirred a revival of medieval-style public humiliation, a fixture of "Public shaming through social media is clearly a puritanical 17th century American colonial life. way that people in our society informally 'punish' those who violate the rules, even if the rules of our The difference is that shamers today can shame society aren't law," said Lori Brown, a sociology anonymously, behind the mask of bogus identities. professor at Meredith College in North Carolina. And there is no need to turn up in person at the village green to join the baying mob. "It is similar to the public stocks and just like that kind of punishment, some are content with simply New York University environmental studies ridiculing the person, but others may want to throw professor Jennifer Jacquet said shaming has value things or even harm this person," she told AFP. as a useful tool for advancing political change and social reform. "So there is the dangerous or potentially cruel edge to this kind of public shaming." But Jacquet, author of "Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool," wonders if 2015 is the year Some have found themselves in the crosshairs of that shaming has reached its peak. social media shaming by discovering the hard way that humor doesn't travel well in a 144-character "We really do have this pile-up of victims where we tweet. go, 'Mmm, maybe we went a little overboard'," she told AFP in a telephone interview. "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!" New York PR executive Justine Here to stay Sacco famously quipped before flying off to Cape Town in 2013. "Shame is never going to go away. I think the real 1 / 2 question is how we use it in society to good ends that the general broader democracy can support." Vanitha Swaminathan, a University of Pittsburgh marketing professor, said the reputational consequences of online shaming can be so severe that it may look out of proportion to whatever prompted it. "On the flip side, the speed at which these transgressions achieve prominence and fade away suggests that while social media backlash may seem very harsh, social media's attention span is also narrow," she said. © 2015 AFP APA citation: Shamers on the prowl in social media jungle (2015, August 1) retrieved 29 September 2021 from https://phys.org/news/2015-08-shamers-prowl-social-media-jungle.html This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only. 2 / 2 Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org).
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Cancel Culture: Posthuman Hauntologies in Digital Rhetoric and the Latent Values of Virtual Community Networks
    CANCEL CULTURE: POSTHUMAN HAUNTOLOGIES IN DIGITAL RHETORIC AND THE LATENT VALUES OF VIRTUAL COMMUNITY NETWORKS By Austin Michael Hooks Heather Palmer Rik Hunter Associate Professor of English Associate Professor of English (Chair) (Committee Member) Matthew Guy Associate Professor of English (Committee Member) CANCEL CULTURE: POSTHUMAN HAUNTOLOGIES IN DIGITAL RHETORIC AND THE LATENT VALUES OF VIRTUAL COMMUNITY NETWORKS By Austin Michael Hooks A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree of Master of English The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Chattanooga, Tennessee August 2020 ii Copyright © 2020 By Austin Michael Hooks All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT This study explores how modern epideictic practices enact latent community values by analyzing modern call-out culture, a form of public shaming that aims to hold individuals responsible for perceived politically incorrect behavior via social media, and cancel culture, a boycott of such behavior and a variant of call-out culture. As a result, this thesis is mainly concerned with the capacity of words, iterated within the archive of social media, to haunt us— both culturally and informatically. Through hauntology, this study hopes to understand a modern discourse community that is bound by an epideictic framework that specializes in the deconstruction of the individual’s ethos via the constant demonization and incitement of past, current, and possible social media expressions. The primary goal of this study is to understand how these practices function within a capitalistic framework and mirror the performativity of capital by reducing affective human interactions to that of a transaction.
    [Show full text]
  • Scarlet Letters: Meat, Normality and the Power of Shaming
    Scarlet Letters: Meat, Normality and the Power of Shaming By Nicolas Delon In 2018 and 2019, a series of attacks by vegan activists struck meat- related businesses in France. Deemed “extreme” and “violent” by butchers, these actions invite us to reflect on the ethics of activism. Is it ever morally permissible to engage in illegal activism? Are tactics such as shaming even effective? As of this writing, a butcher shop in Paris was just vandalized, allegedly by vegan activists. From November 2018 to February 2019, a series of attacks struck meat-related businesses in the north of France. The damage included broken windows, fires at butchers’ shops, fishmongers, and restaurants, inflicted on nocturnal raids where activists also scrawled slogans such as “Stop Speciesism” and “Assassins”. Last June, butchers wrote to the interior ministry a letter to request increased protection, worrying about the consequences of “excessive media hype around vegan lifestyles”, and that vegans wanted to “impose their lifestyle on the immense majority of people”. Two animal rights activists were recently convicted of criminal damage by a court in Lille. “We needed an example to be made of them so that these actions by small groups with extremist and profoundly violent ideas come to an end,” said the head of the local butchers’ federation, Laurent Rigaud. France is no stranger to protests but the attacks shocked many in a country where gastronomy takes pride of place in culture. The attacks took place against the background of growing discussions around meat, animal abuse, veganism and speciesism, fueled in part by a string of undercover investigations led by the animal rights organization L-214 in slaughterhouses.
    [Show full text]
  • AN EXAMINATION of CANCEL CULTURE ACTS AS a FORM of COUNTERSPEECH to REGULATE HATE SPEECH ONLINE. Morgan English
    CANCEL CULTURE: AN EXAMINATION OF CANCEL CULTURE ACTS AS A FORM OF COUNTERSPEECH TO REGULATE HATE SPEECH ONLINE. Morgan English A thesis submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts of Technology and Communication in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Chapel Hill 2021 Approved by: Tori Ekstrand Barbra Friedman David Ardia © 2021 Morgan English All Rights Reserved ii ABSTRACT Morgan English: Cancel Culture: An Examination of Cancel Culture Acts as a Form of Counterspeech to Regulate Hate Speech Online. Under the direction of (Tori Ekstrand) The purpose of this paper is to introduce the use of cancel culture as a form of counterspeech that regulates hate speech online. Opponents of cancel culture argue that it deters people from speaking by suppressing their speech, and it makes it harder for people to participate in the free speech environment. But cancel culture may be the preferred form of counterspeech that opponents of cancel culture complain about to redress hate speech. The purpose of this thesis is to examine how cancel culture is a form of counterspeech that can effectively condemn people for their speech and serve the marketplace of ideas. Cancel culture has been studied as a communications and discourse phenomenon, but less has been said about its role as an effective strategy within the First Amendment’s counterspeech doctrine on online platforms. This paper will attempt to fill that gap. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Throughout the writing of this Thesis, I have received a great deal of support and assistance.
    [Show full text]
  • Social Norms, Shame, and Regulation in an Internet Age Kate Klonick
    Maryland Law Review Volume 75 | Issue 4 Article 4 Re-Shaming the Debate: Social Norms, Shame, and Regulation in an Internet Age Kate Klonick Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/mlr Part of the Internet Law Commons, and the Law and Society Commons Recommended Citation 75 Md. L. Rev. 1029 (2016) This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Academic Journals at DigitalCommons@UM Carey Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Maryland Law Review by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UM Carey Law. For more information, please contact [email protected]. RE-SHAMING THE DEBATE: SOCIAL NORMS, SHAME, AND REGULATION IN AN INTERNET AGE * KATE KLONICK Advances in technological communication have dramatically changed the ways in which social norm enforcement is used to constrain behavior. Nowhere is this more powerfully demonstrated than through current events around online shaming and cyber harassment. Low cost, anonymous, instant, and ubiquitous access to the Internet has removed most—if not all—of the natural checks on shaming. The result is norm enforcement that is indeterminate, uncalibrated, and often tips into behavior punishable in its own right—thus generating a debate over whether the state should intervene to curb online shaming and cyber harassment. A few years before this change in technology, a group of legal scholars debated just the opposite, discussing the value of harnessing the power of social norm enforcement through shaming by using state shaming sanctions as a more efficient means of criminal punishment. Though the idea was discarded, many of their concerns were prescient and can inform today’s inverted new inquiry: whether the state should create limits on shaming and cyber bullying.
    [Show full text]
  • Fifteen Minutes of Shame?
    Uppsala University Department of Sociology Master’s Thesis in Sociology Spring 2020 Fifteen Minutes of Shame? Understanding the Experience of Being Subjected to Moral Outrage Online Author: Julia Zabielski Supervisor: Clara Iversen Examiner: Sebastian Abrahamsson ​ 1 Abstract Due to new technological affordances, such as the internet and social media, people are more exposed than ever to actions or statements that may be perceived as moral violations. Consequently, moral outrage has become a prevalent feature in the online sphere. While it is well-known how moral outrage arises and what kind of practices it motivates, little is still known in regards to how moral outrage is experienced by the individuals who are at the receiving end of such outrage. The purpose of this study was thus to explore how individuals ​ understand their experiences of being subjected to moral outrage online. Drawing on a theoretical framework comprised by interactionist and symbolic interactionist concepts, the study analysed interviews conducted with twelve individuals who have been subjected to moral outrage online. The findings show that the individuals understand their experience as being characterized by a sense of being in the hands of others once their action or statement had been reframed into a moral violation. The moral outrage is furthermore understood as having wider social consequences that contributed to, solidified or, by contrast, mitigated the experience of becoming an outcast, while also predominantly being understood as having a negative impact on the individuals’ sense of self. Accordingly, by taking these individuals’ understanding of moral outrage online into account, rather than problematizing their actions or statements, the study opens up for a discussion in regards to how moral outrage expressed online may itself be problematic and worthy of critical reflection.
    [Show full text]
  • Social Media Shaming and Bullying / by Robert M
    ® About the Author Robert M. Henderson has worked as an editor and copywriter for more than thirty years. He is the author of National Geographic’s World Regions: West Asia and The Spread of Hate and Extremism. He currently lives in Vermont. © 2021 ReferencePoint Press, Inc. Printed in the United States For more information, contact: ReferencePoint Press, Inc. PO Box 27779 San Diego, CA 92198 www.ReferencePointPress.com ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, web distribution, or information storage retrieval systems—without the written permission of the publisher. Picture Credits: Cover: Shutterstock.com 30: Lopolo/Shutterstock.com 5: fizkes/Shutterstock.com 33: antoniodiaz/Shutterstock.com 11: pixelheadphoto/digitalskillet/Shutterstock.com 38: Brent Eysler/Shutterstock.com 14: Aldo Murillo/iStock 41: Jaguar PS/Shutterstock.com 16: Maury Aaseng 45: Matheus Obst/Shutterstock.com 22: sirtravelalot/Shutterstock.com 49: DGLimages/Shutterstock.com 25: JuliusKielaitis/Shutterstock.com 50: fizkes/Shutterstock.com 28: tommaso79/Shutterstock.com 54: Nuchylee/Shutterstock.com LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING- IN- PUBLICATION DATA Names: Henderson, Robert M., author. Title: Social media shaming and bullying / by Robert M. Henderson. Description: San Diego, CA : ReferencePoint Press, Inc., 2021. | Series: The risks of social media | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers:
    [Show full text]
  • Online Reputation What Are They Saying About Me? Discussion Paper Prepared by the Policy and Research Group of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
    –––––– Online Reputation What are they saying about me? Discussion Paper prepared by the Policy and Research Group of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada Table of Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................................................................................... 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................................. 1 Reputation and Privacy ............................................................................................................................................................ 1 Some features of online reputation ..................................................................................................................................... 2 Real world risks of reputational harm .................................................................................................................................. 3 Posting information about others ........................................................................................................................................ 4 A word about kids .................................................................................................................................................................... 4 The right to be forgotten ........................................................................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • The Efficacy of Online Shaming As a Modality for Social Control: a Survey Amongst Uitm Law Students
    International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences Vol. 8 , No. 12, Dec, 2018, E-ISSN: 2222-6990 © 2018 HRMARS The Efficacy of Online Shaming as a Modality for Social Control: A Survey amongst UiTM Law Students Nurul Shuhada Suhaimi, Anida Mahmood, Nur Asma Yahya, Fazlin Mohamed Zain, Haswira Nor Mohamad Hashim To Link this Article: http://dx.doi.org/10.6007/IJARBSS/v8-i12/5083 DOI: 10.6007/IJARBSS/v8-i12/5083 Received: 17 Oct 2018, Revised: 22 Dec 2018, Accepted: 28 Dec 2018 Published Online: 30 Dec 2018 In-Text Citation: (Suhaimi, Mahmood, Yahya, Zain, & Hashim, 2018) To Cite this Article: Suhaimi, N. S., Mahmood, A., Yahya, N. A., Zain, F. M., & Hashim, H. N. M. (2018). The Efficacy of Online Shaming as a Modality for Social Control: A Survey amongst UiTM Law Students. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 8(12), 903–911. Copyright: © 2018 The Author(s) Published by Human Resource Management Academic Research Society (www.hrmars.com) This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this license may be seen at: http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode Vol. 8, No. 12, 2018, Pg. 903 - 911 http://hrmars.com/index.php/pages/detail/IJARBSS JOURNAL HOMEPAGE Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://hrmars.com/index.php/pages/detail/publication-ethics 903 International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences Vol.
    [Show full text]
  • Online Public Shaming: Virtues and Vices
    Online Public Shaming: Virtues and Vices We are witnessing increasing use of the Internet, particular social media, to criticize (perceived) moral failings and misdemeanors. This phenom- enon of so-called ‘online public shaming’ could provide a powerful tool for reinforcing valuable social norms. But it also threatens unwarranted and severe punishments meted out by online mobs. Drawing on the work of John Locke, as well as on recent discussions of social norms, we analyze the dangers associated with the informal enforcement of norms, but also highlight the promise of this practice. We then consider two cru- cial conditions that online public shaming must meet in order to be justi- fiable: proportionality and accountability. We argue that these require- ments are in fact frequently violated, rendering most cases of online pub- lic shaming unjustified. While the use of online public shaming against others’ vices has some apparent virtues, it is currently rarely justified, given its own vices. Keywords: Accountability; Locke; proportionality; public shaming; social norms 1 1. Introduction The phrase “public shaming” brings to mind stocks, pillories, and rotten tomatoes. But the phenomenon of public shaming has kept pace with technological progress. Public shaming has gone digital. The Internet affords unprecedented opportunities to criticize those we consider to have done wrong. Ill-advised tweets, photos, and Facebook posts regularly go viral and attract streams of criticism. Moreover, individuals regularly take to the Internet to denounce
    [Show full text]
  • Mitigation of Online Public Shaming Using Machine Learning Framework
    International Journal of Current Engineering and Technology E-ISSN 2277 – 4106, P-ISSN 2347 – 5161 ©2021 INPRESSCO®, All Rights Reserved Available at http://inpressco.com/category/ijcet Research Article Mitigation of Online Public Shaming Using Machine Learning Framework Mrs.Vaishali Kor and Prof. Mrs. D.M.Gohil Department of Computer Engineering DY Patil college of Engineering, Akurdi, Pune Savitribai Phule Pune University Pune, India Received 10 Nov 2020, Accepted 10 Dec 2020, Available online 01 Feb 2021, Special Issue-8 (Feb 2021) Abstract In the digital world, billions of users are associated with social network sites. User interactions with these social sites, like twitter has an enormous and occasionally undesirable impact implications for daily life. Large amount of unwanted and irrelevant information gets spread across the world using online social networking sites. Twitter has become one of the most enormous platforms and it is the most popular micro blogging services to connect people with the same interests. Nowadays, Twitter is a rich source of human generated information which includes potential customers which allows direct two-way communication with customers. It is noticed that out of all the participating users who post comments in a particular occurrences, majority of them are likely to embarrass the victim. Interestingly, it is also the case that shaming whose follower counts increase at higher speed than that of the non- shaming in Twitter. The proposed system allows users to find disrespectful words and their overall polarity in percentage is calculated using machine learning. Shaming tweets are grouped into nine types: abusive, comparison, religious, passing judgment, jokes on personal issues, vulgar, spam, nonspam and whataboutery by choosing appropriate features and designing a set of classifiers to detect it.
    [Show full text]
  • Rebecca Hawkes Local Nazis in Your Area: Public Shaming And
    Rebecca Hawkes Local Nazis in your Area: Public shaming and communal disgust in the doxing of white nationalists at Charlottesville Local Nazis in your Area: Public shaming and communal disgust in the doxing of white nationalists at Charlottesville is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 4.0 International License. This publication may be cited as: Rebecca Hawkes. (2017). Local Nazis in your Area: Public shaming and communal disgust in the doxing of white nationalists at Charlottesville. Pūrātoke: Journal of Undergraduate Research in the Creative Arts and Industries, 1(1), 057-069. Founded at Unitec Institute of Technology in 2017 ISSN 2538-0133 An ePress publication [email protected] www.unitec.ac.nz/epress/ Unitec Institute of Technology Private Bag 92025 Victoria Street West Auckland 1010 Aotearoa New Zealand 058 Rebecca Hawkes LOCAL NAZIS IN YOUR AREA: PUBLIC SHAMING AND COMMUNAL DISGUST IN THE DOXING OF WHITE NATIONALISTS AT CHARLOTTESVILLE Abstract Eagerness to ‘name and shame’ neo-Nazis after alt-right violence and intimidation at the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, has revitalised the ethical debate over the practice of ‘doxing’ (dropping documents) to publicly shame previously unidentified white nationalists. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s politics of emotion to analyse the affective politics of doxing as a weaponised form of public shaming and expression of personal disgust raises urgent questions about the effects and ethics of doxing as an activist practice and form of cyber-harrassment. Rebecca Hawkes 059 Pūrātoke 060 The social justice-oriented Twitter account @YesYoureRacist, dedicated to outing racist individuals since 2012, has been influential during and after the Charlottesville rallies.
    [Show full text]
  • The Art of Medicine COVID-19, Online Shaming, and Health-Care Professionals
    The art of medicine COVID-19, online shaming, and health-care professionals Stigma and shame are common features of pandemics. The stigma associated with disease can be experienced as shame by those who spread it. In almost all human cultures, there is shame attached to being “contaminated”, to the vulnerability inherent in illness, and to potentially spreading a disease to others. As previous pandemics have taught us, coming into contact with, or being associated with, a highly infectious and potentially deadly disease has social consequences. Hence, it is no surprise that stigma and shame have developed around COVID-19. Although there have been outpourings of support and admiration for health-care workers for their work in this pandemic, health professionals have been among those directly affected. In previous epidemics, health-care workers have been shunned, feared, and treated with suspicion. Doctors on HIV wards in the UK during the 1990s described how anxieties around “contamination” led colleagues in other specialties to stigmatise their work as devalued and shameful. In an outbreak of Ebola virus disease in Uganda in 2000–01, one nurse heartbreakingly recalled, “Our clothes were burned, and our children kept away from us, our families shunned us and were afraid of us.” Health-care workers on the front line of the COVID-19 response have similarly been victims of stigmatisation and shaming, sometimes leading to violence and abuse. The fear of contamination and of spreading the virus has led to nurses in the UK being attacked on the street; care workers being verbally abused in supermarkets; and paramedics being evicted from their homes.
    [Show full text]